Certainty within Uncertainty

I recently came across a few news items: Signal testing phone-numberless registration; a Coldcard hardware wallet being compromised; and the Situational Awareness fund suffering liquidation.

Although seemingly unrelated, these headlines prompted a sudden realization: is there anything in this world that remains truly certain?

The answer seems to be: no.

Looking at ancient divination systems, the Xia and Shang dynasties relied on Lianshan and Guizang to interpret omens, anchoring their predictive models on static objects like mountains and the earth. By the Zhou dynasty, however, diviners realized that a predictive function built on static inputs explained very little of the variance in the ultimate output y—that is, its coefficient of determination (R²) was low. Consequently, the core of divination pivoted from the static realm of mountains and earth to dynamic celestial movements.

Yet this evolution introduced a new challenge: model overfitting. While broadening the scope of explanation, it simultaneously expanded the decision space. You could no longer be certain which path was correct. This is precisely what we witness today—competing perspectives constantly clashing in the market. No one knows where markets are headed next, nor whether the Strait of Hormuz will face another closure.

Faced with uncertainty, the primal human reaction is fear. Even though divination and astrology offered guidance, a recommendation that shifts alongside a changing state s is itself inherently uncertain. Is our universe truly devoid of certainty?

Buddhism offers an answer: the meta-rules of evolution are certain.

If you plug the drain of a basin, fill it with water, and then pull the plug, a whirlpool forms. If you scoop up a cup of water from the basin, the whirlpool in the basin remains, yet there is no whirlpool inside the cup. The observed phenomena are constantly shifting, but water remains water.

Variables are phenomena; rules are the essence. Expressed as a functional formula:

Effect = 𝑓(Cause, Conditions)

As long as a cause is planted as a seed, the presence of environmental condition variables will inevitably trigger the output effect.

With this framework in mind, re-reading those headlines reveals that the seeds of their outcomes were likely sown at the very beginning:

Even without phone numbers, Signal users can still be identified through heuristic analysis.

Coldcard possessed structural vulnerabilities from its inception that were only recently exposed.

The moment Leopold Aschenbrenner built his first fortune on high leverage, the eventual outcome was already sealed.

Once a cause is planted, the arrival of the matching conditions is merely a matter of time. Even if the probability is infinitesimally small, given enough time, it will inevitably occur. Murphy’s Law highlights this exact dynamic.

As the Zuo Zhuan succinctly puts it:"He who rises by this shall perish by this."